Dirk Ehnts — A simple macroeconomic model based on Modern Monetary Theory (and published in 2014 in a peer-reviewed journal

by
Mike Norman
My articles My siteAbout meMy booksMy videos
Follow on:TwitterFacebook

There is a lot of talk about how MMT would lack a “model”. Some commentators on Twitter even claim that MMT would have “no model” and that they just created one themselves. Others believe that stock-flow consistent (SFC) models are basically SFC models. All of that is not quite right!

I think that the only model that can really claim to be a “MMT model” is the one I published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2014. The article in the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education (IJPEE) was named “A simple macroeconomic model of a currency union with endogenous money and saving-investment imbalances” (link). With hindsight, it was not a good title, since there is nothing specific about “currency union” or (private!) “saving-investment imbalances” in the model. It is really a replacement of the IS/LM-model and nothing else. The working paper version is accessible freely and was written in 2012 (link). During that year, I was at the Hyman-Minsky summer school at the Levy Institute of Bard College, NY. I showed the model to Randy Wray and Scott Fullwiler and some other people and they all liked it. Given that my model has the sectoral balances at its core that did not surprise me.

Since the model has not gotten a lot of attention so far – I presented it at University of Cassino in Italy after being invited there to spend a week with SFC modeler Gennaro Zezza and in some other place – I would like to use this blog post to explain the model briefly. Of course, the IJPEE paper is the long version. (The working paper contains some minor flaws that had been fixed in the journal version.) For those who can’t wait to see it, you can download a spreadsheet file of the ISMY model here. It has all the equations and is solvable by toying around with it....